Category: Productivity

Everyone who gets serious about improving their existence system finds themselves wondering what tools are best suited to the purpose. . . . Some of us get fairly obsessed with this question, and go on a hunt for the perfect tool or set of tools to keep ourselves organized. There’s a belief, or maybe a hope, that finding the right tool will somehow automate the process of navigating our lives, ensuring that we always do what needs to be done without having to give it a thought. Of course, there’s no such tool. No matter how well designed our productivity tools may be, it’s our productivity practices that get the job done. . . .

An existence system has to accomplish three things:

• Make us reliable, so that nothing slips through the cracks;
• Help us prioritize, so that we never realize that we’ve just spent a couple of hours doing something other than the thing we should have been doing;
• Provide peace of mind — that is, reduce the stress and anxiety that can come from having a lot of stuff on our plate.

The key to all three goals is to stop keeping track of anything in our heads. . . .

I have a new coaching client. He’s an exceedingly bright and hard-working manager who sometimes gets into trouble because his structures for keeping track of everything he’s taken on aren’t quite up to the task. In the interest of clarifying for myself how I will approach this assignment, I decided write out what I consider to be the key principles for optimizing one’s personal productivity. . . .

Before I retired five years ago I was responsible for overseeing the various productivity-improvement initiatives undertaken by my company’s R&D organization. After I left that job, my “retirement gig” involved showing managers and knowledge workers how they could better manage their incoming email so as to avoid “email overwhelm” and do a better job of tracking everything they needed to attend to.
Along the way I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it takes to maximize one’s personal productivity, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more challenging it seems. That’s because it’s a multi-factorial problem, so there is no one approach, no particular system, that addresses all the obstacles to being productive. . . .

I’m keeping it simple today, just sharing a link to a blog post by Cal Newport on how best to manage the avalanche of work demands that descend on knowledge workers each day through email, phone calls and Zoom meetings…